Microship Status Reports

by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California July 31, 1996 “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Antoine de Saint-Exup’ery Hubnode, Power Tracker, And More The three weeks since issue #108 have been a busy…

(Microship Status #108) by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California July 9, 1996 I’ve been so thoroughly immersed in hacking and writing that I’m becoming confused about the nature of that broad-spectrum light source that floods the front end of the building during about 60% of every 24-hour cycle… any theories? There…

by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California June 20, 1996 With every passing hour our solar system comes forty-three thousand miles closer to globular cluster M13 in the constellation Hercules, and still there are some misfits who continue to insist that there is no such thing as progress. — Ransom K. Ferm…

by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California May 17, 1996 “So with a trimaran, you actually have THREE holes in the water to pour money into…” — John Wharton, Stanford University, AMW, & Intel 8051 architect Actually, it hasn’t been QUITE that exciting, but we do have news of incremental developments and…

by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California May 2, 1996 THE SeXBAR IS ALIVE! Ah, the simultaneous joy and frustration of debugging: the joy of finding that a suspected problem is OK after all and the frustration of having absolutely no new theories about why the damn thing’s still not working. This…

by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California April 24, 1996 Oh Yeah… Wanderlust It’s a strange phenomenon, this technomadic life. The past few days, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting a couple of travelers who independently wandered by and crossed paths here at the lab. Ryan McKenzie is off on a bicycle…

It is both delightful and scary to have so many knowledgeable people on this mailing list! No technical error in my tales goes unreported… in response to last week’s April Fools issue (#101), I received detailed explanations about GPS encoding from both NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs and the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering at…

by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California March 26, 1996 Lab HF Station Alive N4RVE, bicycle-immobile, is back on the air! The great pasta monopole arcing into the Santa Clara sky still needs a few more tuned radials to optimize radiation angle per Dave Wright’s suggestion, but hey, it works. Perched precariously…

by Steven K. Roberts Nomadic Research Labs Santa Clara, California March 18, 1996 Non-sequiturs a-plenty I’ve been sitting here with the blank screen syndrome for a few minutes, and finally recognized the problem: Microship progress in the past 2 weeks has been on so many scattered fronts that it’s a bit hard to come up…